So, should we compel children to have the jab because our social conscience says it's a good thing, or be libertarian and let them go to hell in a handcart?

Compulsion because the vast majority will benefit and would be vulnerable to irresponsible behaviour. However that carries a responsibility to ensure that anyone who is damaged gets the benefit of any doubt and is suitably looked after by the rest of us irrespective of cost.

I am not an epidemiologist, but my limited understanding of mass vaccination procedures is that they provide a great benefit to the general population, at the expense of (very rare) tragic consequences for the odd individual. The authorities are therefore broadly in favour, while some individuals have reservations.

Children are not capable of making an informed choice in this matter, so it is another of the areas where their parents / guardians have to make the decision.

I can just about accept the authorities promoting the virtues, but a "no jab, no school" policy is unacceptable totalitarianism. (Wouldn't affect us up here, we don't have "jabs", we have "jags").

that was the policy in part of the 'Land of the free' when we were there, '80s: our County in Maryland for Public (ie, as we would say, 'State' or 'Maintained') Schools. It was a County policy, as was all education; other Md Counties may have been different. Coming from UK, we had to show convincing evidence of MMR for our school age children as part of the enrolment process.

Strictly, it was 'no Public School'; what private schools did or required was up to them ..

News reports suggest that in some States or parts thereof there may be 'religious' or 'medical' exemptions, and that these are promoted/abused by some anti-vaxxers. One concentration of measles outbreaks at a particularly dangerous age (teens and early '20s) is reportedly in one Borough of New York City where adherents of one religion opposed to vaccination are concentrated, but not only among those adherents, illustrating the wider epidemiological hazard.

Bill Haddow wrote:I am not an epidemiologist, but my limited understanding of mass vaccination procedures is that they provide a great benefit to the general population, at the expense of (very rare) tragic consequences for the odd individual. The authorities are therefore broadly in favour, while some individuals have reservations.

Surely this has been done to death and should have been put to bed decades ago. The benefits for both individuals and society outweigh the disadvantages. The science that suggested that they didn't has been proven to be fraudulent.

The trouble is that trying to convince people with evidence plainly doesn't work (and not only with vaccination)

Jim Jones wrote:Chance of your unvaccinated child being harmed by disease is Y in 1000000

The problem is that Y varies depending on how many of the overall population are vaccinated.If your child is not vaccinated, but the whole of the rest of the population is vaccinated, then the risk to your child is vanishingly small. And a tiny number of parents who think like that doesn't impact on the amount of disease in the population.But as more and more people stop having their children vaccinated there comes a point where the disease can't be kept down. Vaccination isn't simply to protect your own child - it's to protect the population as a whole. Smallpox? Polio?

Yet vaccination is not just about the individual but the whole herd. Not sure how parental choice is handled in this case.

Some parents, selfishly, make the informed choice that their child benefits because the rest of the herd is vaccinated so their kid is unlikely to get the disease. Their child also has no vaccination risk. I don't think the selfish should be the winners here.

Let them send their kids to a school with all the other unvaccinated kids. That would soon put an end to it.

There is always going to be some risk, no matter how small, with medical intervention. So even if we had some figures to bandy about the selfish would still be selfish at the expense of others.

Jim Jones wrote:If there was a reliable, evidence based statistic along the lines of:

Chance of your child being harmed by vaccinations is X in 1000000

Chance of your unvaccinated child being harmed by disease is Y in 1000000

-Then parents make informed choices.

I am not aware of any such calculation, however some here may do.

Sadly, people are consistently bad at evaluating statistics and risks. So I don't think "informed choice" is a good idea.

More importantly, for group immunity that's not really the issue. The children that a mandatory vaccination scheme really protects are the (rare) ones who can't get the shot because of allergies, etc. Any parent who weighs, say, a 1-1,000 risk that another kid gets sick against a 1-10,000 risk that his own child is harmed would pick his own offspring over 10 strangers any day. That's not wrong: it's what parents do. So society sometimes have to override its individual members.

matthew_w100 wrote:Sorry - I'm mystified. What are these "harmed by vaccinations" situations previous posters are referring to? The answer to JJ's question is that X is zero.

The trouble is that it isn't zero..... there are quite common adverse effects (that are not serious but are adverse effects all the same. ) Things like pain at the injection site, and flu like symptoms.

Serious side effect do occur (anaphylaxis for example) but are very rare (but manageable) but do occur (about 1 in 900,000)

Many people don't have a clue what any of the numbers mean and in any case don't act rationally when their offspring are involved.

Paul

The forum seems to have stopped logging me out at random intervals. Perhaps they like me after all? (Thanks for fixing it) Our pleasure!

Its a long time ago, but while dealing with my mother's outrage at "her grandchild" being "exposed to MMR" I think I recall reading at the CDC that any single MMR jab has a 1 in 40 chance of being ineffective, which is why there are two jabs.

So something like 1 in 1600 of the "vaccinated" are not actually vaccinated, and remain at risk from these morons. It's not only their own children's health they risk.

A report on the most recent large-scale UK measles outbreak in South Wales in 2012-2013 showed two doses of MMR vaccine to be over 99% effective in preventing measles. Fewer than 1 in 100 fully vaccinated children caught measles during the outbreak. One dose of MMR was over 97% effective in protecting against measles. Two doses of MMR vaccine are also around 88% effective against mumps, and at least 97% effective against rubella.

matthew_w100 wrote:Sorry - I'm mystified. What are these "harmed by vaccinations" situations previous posters are referring to? The answer to JJ's question is that X is zero.

Some ten years ago, a flu vaccine caused an increased risk of narcolepsy in children and teenagers. There is also the very slight risk of allergic reactions. So nothing is risk-free, even taking a trip to get the shot carries some risk.

Please don’t confuse the above with the scientology nonsense about autism. Also: ”risk” means exactly that. It’s a risk. Not a big risk, only a non-zero possibility of an adverse effekt. The power that the word carries is another reason why people can’t make informed choices.